Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive

by Shiden Kanzaki

  Doom and panic prevailed inside the car. Rentaro jostled his way to the front. No time to think. Sizing up the whirling blades wresting the doors open, he rolled up his right sleeve, revealing his cybernetic arm as he held his body low.

  Waiting for the moment when the door was open enough, he activated his arm. There was a loud percussion, followed by a single empty cartridge spinning in the air.

  “—Kohaku Tensei!”

  He unleashed his arm, driven by a sudden massive propulsion that sent him into the lobby. The punch, easily a match for the mysterious spinning object, cut through the blades. He could feel the blow hitting home.

  The tables were quickly turned. Rentaro’s blow, powerful enough to send a microbus into the air, smashed right through the spinning saw, sending it bounding off the floor and into the opposite wall.

  “What is that…?!”

  Now the enemy was fully in sight. “Tire monster” was the only way to describe it. Its engine revved loudly. An unmanned drone? Or…?

  The person who called Dr. Surumi’s home came back to his memory. “The enemy’s about to head your way. Code name Hummingbird. A soldier from the New World Creation Project.”

  If this was what this Hummingbird was capable of, Rentaro knew someone who had notably similar capabilities. Tina Sprout. She had a brain-machine interface that let her use brain signals to operate autonomous machines—technology that Ain Rand, genius scientist and former colleague of Sumire Muroto’s, pioneered and produced. Meanwhile, Yuga Mitsugi—aka Dark Stalker—boasted the same abilities as Rentaro’s 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye, an advanced piece of tech that Sumire expended countless hours of research and effort to complete.

  What kind of group would it take to not only copy this tech, but actually upgrade it? Who was behind the New World Creation Project…?

  Rentaro had little time to think about it. The tire monster resumed its position. He removed the Beretta from his holster and fired two shots. Shockingly, the enemy zigzagged left and right to dodge them. Rentaro deliberately ignored the gunsights his eye put up for him and fired again, aiming at a fire extinguisher near the hole the tire just gouged into the wall.

  The sturdily built Varanium bullet broke through the glass and dented the aluminum exterior. Rentaro kept firing. On the fourth shot, the extinguisher finally gave up the ghost against the supersonic 9-mm Varanium bullets and went flying. He was ready for this.

  “Haaahhh!”

  The next moment, he closed in on the tire, gun aimed at the engine inside its hub.

  “Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 12—”

  He triggered a cartridge in his arm. The smell of gunpowder burned his nostrils. The monster shuddered in fear, but it was too late.

  “—Senkuu Renen!”

  The entire floor shook as his hand plowed through the tire’s engine and sank into the floor itself with a loud bang. The force of the point-blank strike rendered his enemy motionless, the faintly blinking signal light on it fading as it fell to the ground.

  Once he was sure it was done for, Rentaro loosened up his body and took a breath. Leaving a BMI-driven machine unattended would be suicide. It was better for him to crush it while he had the chance. It was a lesson Rentaro had to learn the hard way in his fight against Tina.

  Rentaro took a look around the first-floor lobby as the smoky mist from the extinguisher began to dissipate. The sight made him furrow his brows. The BMI devices had done in some of the residents who’d noticed early on that something was up and had tried to escape. The bodies were now in multiple pieces and splattered across the walls and floor. Was everyone in the New World Creation Project this heartless…?

  Then, remembering his duty, he turned back through the mist, toward the elevator as he waved his arms.

  “It’s all clear now!”

  The people slowly, warily filed out of the elevator car. One of them, the old man in the bathrobe, asked a question.

  “Wh-what is this? What’s going on…?”

  Rentaro shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I can say is that the lobby’s safe. All of you get out right now and call the police.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll get as many people out of here as I can until the police come.”

  It wasn’t a very well-made plan, but without so much as an emergency alarm at his disposal, the best one he could think of involved positioning himself and the residents up and down the elevator until police arrived. Considering he was a wanted man, he wasn’t entirely sure he had an escape route if the authorities decided to send an army of cops his way, but he wasn’t willing to simply leave this hideous murder scene behind him and run. Besides, the whole reason for this massacre was because Rentaro was here, paying a visit to Dr. Surumi.

  Rentaro watched the twelfth-floor denizens leave out the front door, then turned around. He noticed someone still on the elevator. The girl with the teddy bear. Rentaro irritatedly waved at her.

  “Hey! You get out of here! You want to get killed?”

  The girl meekly smiled back. “Let me help, too,” she said. “Two people would be more efficient than one, right?”

  It was a fairly incredible request to Rentaro’s ears. Unless you were trained to do so, or at least had a fairly strong sense of duty, you wouldn’t be wanting to help other people in a situation where your own life was in danger. If a lion was chasing you, your main focus wouldn’t be on the friend running away with you.

  But this girl…?

  Rentaro was honestly more suspicious than thankful.

  The girl gave him a flick of her eyebrows and smiled. “Come on, let’s go. Even as we speak, those tire monsters are still running around, aren’t they? It’ll be twice as efficient with the two of us.”

  She had a point. Rentaro closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them.

  “All right. You can help if you want. I’ll get off at the eleventh floor,” he said as he entered the car and pushed DOOR CLOSE, “so you take the tenth.”

  Then he smelled something sweet. Perfume. He didn’t notice it when they were packed in like sardines earlier, but she must have been wearing it.

  This triggered something in his brain. Something he heard from Sumire at her underground lab when he discussed the murders of Kenji Houbara, Saya Takamura, and Giichi Ebihara.

  “I got all curious about these murders, so I had Miori give me some information. There were no witnesses to Kenji Houbara’s stabbing at the theater and they couldn’t find any fingerprints on the knife, but apparently there was a faintly sweet scent left on the weapon.”

  —A faintly sweet scent?

  Rentaro shuddered.

  If the tire monsters were BMI devices like Tina’s Shenfield system, there had to be someone nearby the scene controlling them. If Hummingbird was inside the building right now, then where?

  The elevator door closed with a clattering sound. Rentaro’s pulse quickened, his chest pained. He felt nauseated. His hand, checking the position of the holster around his hips, was drenched in sweat. He looked at the girl opposite him in the car, but the large straw hat made it difficult to gauge her expression. She held the teddy bear in her left hand, and now, with her right hand, she was fumbling around its stomach area.

  Taking a closer look, there was an odd indentation in the bear’s stomach. Clearly there was something besides stuffing in it.

  Rentaro’s brain went on red alert. The elevator door was fully closed. The girl moved. Rentaro moved with her. At lightning speed, his gun was drawn and aimed.

  But the next thing he knew, his vision was dominated by the barrel of another gun, one aimed squarely at his head.

  The girl had a ferociously self-confident smile on her face. “Oh-hoh? How come you noticed that, huh? I think this might be the first time I didn’t get the first attack on someone. It’s kind of novel!”

  “Are you Hummingbird?”

  “Uh-huh! I’m the second assassin.”

  Rentaro gr
itted his teeth bitterly. I am such an idiot. How could I fail to notice the assassin when she’s right in front of me?

  “Listen, um, I kinda lied to you earlier.” Hummingbird waited a moment before showing off a mischievous smile. “Hotaru Kouro’s actually been cold dead for a while now.”

  Fury erupted from Rentaro’s fingertips to the top of his head. He squeezed the trigger, just as he tilted his head to the side to get out of her sights. His enemy mirrored him, doing the exact same thing. Two deafening gunshots erupted. The heat from the muzzle flash opposite him made him squint his eyes as he felt a sonic boom from the bullet whizzing by his ear at somewhere above Mach 1.

  One of the shots ricocheted, zinging between the walls of the elevator car—but by some diabolical coincidence, neither party was injured.

  Now it was time to disable the enemy’s weapon. Rentaro slapped the girl’s thin arm away, smashing the elbow on his cybernetic right arm against the palm of her hand. She yelped in pain as the gun fell. A moment later, it transformed into a maniacal laugh.

  What is with this girl?

  Hummingbird lowered her body, then unleashed a kick aimed at Rentaro’s crotch. It was a clean hit. Rentaro fell back just in time to take a blow to a joint right above the arm holding his gun. The pain made him feel like his arm was being twisted off. It made him quickly shut off his pain receptors, but it was just enough to make him drop his own gun.

  The girl rammed into him, plastering him against the wall of the cramped elevator and knocking the wind out of him. His back slammed against the button panel, hard enough to make the elevator shudder to life. A cold sweat ran down his side. He was flexing his muscles to the limit, but the sheer unrelenting force his enemy used against him was something no young girl should possess. Desperate, he finally managed to land three knee strikes on her hips, waiting for her to let up just a little bit before sidestepping around and behind her.

  Then his brain triggered a danger signal. He reared his head back out of instinct, just in time for Hummingbird’s nails to miss the eyes they were targeting. There was no time to even be shocked. He shouted in pain at the blow she then landed on his left calf. The upper-body eye gouge segued perfectly into a low kick.

  Taking a dagger out from the teddy bear lying on the floor, Hummingbird held it close to her stomach and rushed forward. There was too little space to escape.

  With an electronic beep, the door opened behind him. The elevator was on the fifth floor. Rentaro realized he had an escape path after all. There was no time to evaluate how practical his plan was. Grabbing his foe by both shoulders, he diverted the kinetic energy of her bull rush behind his back, holding his own body down as he sent her flying in a classic judo-style overhead throw.

  Unable to stop herself, the girl flew into the air, a surprised look on her face. She must not have realized what had happened to her at first. Before she could, her tiny body smashed into the opposite wall of the elevator lobby at full speed. It offered Rentaro a perfect chance at a follow-up strike, but his leg was still in pain from the low kick, preventing him from taking nimble action.

  Hummingbird leaped back to her feet, hiked up her skirt, drew her auxiliary pistol from a holster strapped to her thigh, and fired. Rentaro hid behind the elevator frame, turning his head against the ensuing blast and rain of sparks. He jabbed at the DOOR CLOSE button. The elevator obeyed after a moment. He pushed the LOBBY button. The elevator began to descend.

  He leaned his body against the now-pockmarked elevator wall, just barely managing not to crumple to the ground. Every part of him was screaming. His bandaged wound was about to reopen. For the time being, at least, he was distant from his foe, but the threat was no less present. His mind raced. What should I do? What should I do?

  Then the elevator rattled like it was the victim of a sudden earthquake, the ceiling light flickering on and off. Rentaro held on to the wall to keep from slipping. Something must’ve fallen on it from above. But what?

  The answer was obvious—Hummingbird had fallen on him from the fifth floor. Rentaro threw his body to the ground, grabbing his Beretta and the gun his enemy dropped, then unloaded both straight upward.

  His foe was firing by instinct from above as well. The flying bullets smashed the button panel and shattered the ceiling lights, sending a rain of glass down at him. He tried as hard as he could to fight back. The concerto of crisscrossing gunfire continued on, empty cartridges providing bombastic percussion to the proceedings. A pang of pain as a bullet grazed his cheek. Then, the intense heat of bullet against bone as a ricocheting shot struck him in the knee.

  Both of his guns ran out of ammo simultaneously. So did his enemy’s. For a moment, there was deafening silence, and the smell of gunpowder assaulting Rentaro’s nostrils.

  What happened?

  After a moment, he heard something heavy thudding against the ceiling above him. Somewhere in the midst of the battle, the elevator had stopped moving. The shot that struck the instrument panel must’ve knocked it offline. The ceiling lights were gone, except for a single flickering bulb. The space was dim.

  Holding a hand against the wall, Rentaro gingerly got himself up and peeled off a dangling, heavily perforated ceiling panel. A prone Hummingbird tumbled into the elevator, groaning once her body hit the floor. Two 9-mm shots in the stomach and one in the chest were staining her dress crimson, her upper body heaving as she gasped for breath. The battle was over for her.

  The girl looked up at the ceiling in disbelief. “You…you’re kidding me,” she whispered. “I was built to…to surpass the New Humanity Creation Project…and I lost…?”

  Rentaro looked down silently at her for a few moments.

  “…There’s a lot I want to ask you. I’ll treat your wounds if you don’t resist me.”

  Hummingbird scowled in self-derision, coughing violently in response to the pain in her chest. A fountain of blood shot out, and faint lines of red oozed from her lips.

  “Don’t be…stupid,” she said weakly, her trembling hands tapping against her heart. “They’re…monitoring my heartbeat, and if, if they, found out you, helped me… I’ll, I’ll be rubbed out either way. You…you’ll never have any more peace. Even if—if I die…it’ll be someone else, next. My friends, will kill…you. It’s all the same.”

  She sighed as she stared upward, resigned to her fate.

  “I guess…I guess Dark Stalker was…right after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dark Stalker…was the only one, who, who recognized…what kind of threat you were. He said you…you were a genius. He wanted to, to fight you again, and…and he fought our, our leader over it.”

  “……”

  Internally, Rentaro was shocked that someone as breathlessly confident of himself as Yuga was willing to heap that much praise upon him. Maybe Yuga Mitsugi was the greatest threat to his life after all.

  Then he noticed Hummingbird’s skirt was up, revealing her lily-white thighs. He gazed at them in wonderment. There was a five-pointed star tattooed on one of them, a pair of intricately designed feathers drawn on two of the points. The exact same. Just what he saw carved on the Gastrea in the photo.

  “Hey!” he hurriedly shouted. “What’s that? What’s that star on you mean?!”

  Hummingbird simply smiled wryly. “Look…look at what’s, what’s inside my teddy bear.”

  Rentaro, despite his suspicion, obeyed. The polar bear, a scarf around his neck, still had an oddly bloated stomach. There must have been another weapon inside. He stuck a hand in, trying to get it out, but it was too big to easily take out of the slit. The bear was soft and fuzzy on the outside, but inside, there was something cold and solid to the touch.

  What is this? Growing increasingly impatient, he finally just ripped the bear’s upper body apart. Cotton stuffing flew out from it, revealing what was inside. Rentaro gulped nervously. The bear’s stomach was lined with cords and lumps of what looked like clay. A cheap digital timer was attached to the middl
e. It had just gone past thirty seconds. The moment he realized it was a time bomb, his blood froze as a dark chill crashed upon his body.

  Hummingbird let out a bitter laugh. “If…if my heartbeat, goes down enough, it’s, it’s set to automatically, go off. The elevator’s down, your leg’s hurt… I don’t think you’re escaping. So…can we, can we call it a draw?”

  “Shit!”

  Rentaro jumped for the door, trying to pry it open. It wouldn’t budge. Then he tried jumping for the ceiling, holding his wounded leg in the air. A sharp pain erupted from it, incapacitating him. Twenty seconds to go.

  Then, with another loud noise, his vision was jarred up and down as his feet struggled for purchase. It didn’t take him as long to realize that something just fell on the elevator again.

  Through a hole in the battered ceiling, he could see what it was.

  Rentaro and Hummingbird both opened their eyes wide, the confused dismay particularly clear upon Hummingbird’s face. She let out a scream.

  “You, you’re supposed to be dead—”

  The reply came in the form of gunfire. With a dry crack from the gun, Hummingbird’s head exploded in a spray of blood, falling limply against the wall behind her.

  A cold voice fell in from above.

  “Good-bye, my splendid princess.”

  “Hotaru!”

  The shadow he could barely make out above turned into a silhouette of Hotaru Kouro, her frozen eyes coming into view.

  “You… Hummingbird said you were dead…”

  Then he shook his head. There were more pressing issues at hand. He looked at the timer. Seven seconds left.

  “Hotaru! The bomb!”

  “Gimme your hand!”

  He lifted up his arm. It was yanked up, hard enough to almost dislocate his shoulder, as he was pulled into the elevator shaft. His vision suddenly went dark, the sound of the cable groaning at the weight pounding his eardrums.

  “Grab on to the wire!”

  Rentaro obediently did so. Four seconds left.

  With a series of nimble shots, Hotaru fired at the braking devices latched on to the guide rail, destroying them all.